Friday, April 04, 2008

BARONESS VON MUNCHAUSEN vs MARTIN LUTHER OBAMA

The Democratic race has clearly devolved into a race between the Baroness von Munchausen and Martin Luther Obama. Charles Krauthammer suggests:

The revulsion at the Clintons' lack of scruples remained latent as long as the focus was on her relatively unknown opponent, a blank slate being filled in with Tony Rezko's shady dealings and Jeremiah Wright's racist rants. Tuzla not only provided a distraction from Obama's problem with the raving reverend, it created the perfect setting for the press to pronounce the Wright affair closed....

It is not just that Obama surrogate Rep. George Miller denounced the Clinton campaign for bringing up Wright when talking to superdelegates as trying to "work the low road." You expect that from a campaign. Or that Andrew Sullivan called Hillary's commenting on Wright "a new low." You expect that from Andrew Sullivan.

But from the mainstream media? As National Review's Byron York has pointed out, when Clinton supporter Lanny Davis said on CNN that it is "legitimate" for her to have remarked "that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost" or the kind of "generic comments (Wright) made about white America," Anderson Cooper, the show's host and alleged moderator, interjected that since "we all know what the (Wright) comments were," he found it "amazing" and "funny" that Davis should "feel the need to repeat them over and over again."

Davis protested, "It's appropriate." Time magazine's Joe Klein promptly smacked Davis down with "Lanny, Lanny, you're spreading the -- you're spreading the poison right now," and then suggested that an "honorable person" would "stay away from this stuff."

Amazing. We've gone beyond moral equivalence to moral inversion. It is now dishonorable to even make note of Wright's bigotry and ask how any man -- let alone a man on the threshold of the presidency -- could associate himself for 20 years with the purveyor of such hate.

The media, Krauthammer astutely notes, has now gone back to protecting the saintly myth of Barack Obama. One example is this piece today from the LA Times, in which MLK is characterized as both the optimistic Obama and the bigoted Rev. Wright; and implies that it is wrong wrong wrong to take Jeremiah Wright's-- "uttered prophetic truths" and caricature them out of "their religious and racial context."

Oh dear. Isn't that just what all those postmodern historians have against the evil slave-holding Founding Fathers? Aren't these "religious and racial contexts" precisely what are used repeatedly to condemn them and proclaim them 'irrelevant'?

Mr. Obama's major speech on race last month was forced from him only after a political crisis erupted: It became widely known that he'd sat for 20 years in the pews of a church where Rev. Jeremiah Wright lashed out at white people. The minister cursed America as worthy of damnation, made lewd suggestions about the nature of President Clinton's relationship with black voters, and embraced the paranoid idea that the white government was spreading AIDS among black people.

Here is where the racial tension at the heart of Mr. Obama's campaign flared into view. He either shared these beliefs or, lacking good judgment, decided it politically expedient for an ambitious young black politician trying to prove his solidarity with all things black, to be associated with these rants. His judgment and leadership on the critical issue of race is in question.

While speaking to black people, King never condescended to offer Rev. Wright-style diatribes or conspiracy theories. He did not paint black people as victims. To the contrary, he spoke about black people as American patriots who believed in the democratic ideals of the country, in nonviolence and the Judeo-Christian ethic, even as they overcame slavery, discrimination and disadvantage. King challenged white America to do the same, to live up to their ideals and create racial unity. He challenged white Christians, asking them how they could treat their fellow black Christians as anything but brothers in Christ.

You have to wonder if Juan Williams will be subjected to the same treatment as Randi Rhodes, who perhaps for the first time in her career has spoken truth to power (i.e., the 'power' or tyranny wielded by the leftist PC police) and now must pay the consequences for daring to be so bold and honest. (She could say such things and far worse about President Bush, and never fear that she would be suspended. In fact, most of her fans would herald such ravings as some sort of courageous confrontation with evil).

Obama’s glamour also accounts for some of his campaign’s other stumbles. Plenty of candidates attract supporters who disagree with them on some issues. Obama is unusual, however. He attracts supporters who not only disagree with his stated positions but assume he does too. They project their own views onto him and figure he is just saying what other, less discerning voters want to hear. So when Obama’s chief economic adviser supposedly told a Canadian official that, contrary to campaign rhetoric, the candidate didn’t want to revise NAFTA, reporters found the story credible. After all, nobody that thoughtful and sophisticated could really oppose free trade.

So, there we have it. The Dems are down to an overt pathological liar or (yet another) well-spoken, metrosexual empty husk, upon whom the frayed ideals of aging hippies can be projected.

Sadly, it is a very hard choice since both accurately represent today's morally and intellectually bankrupt Democratic Party.